Saturday, December 18, 2010

“…the American cinema constantly shoots and re-shoots a single fundamental film, which is the birth of a nation-civilization…” –Gilles Deleuze

I have often thought that one could write something of an history of American ideology in the middle of the last century through the films of Jimmy Stewart. This is in part due to his casting as a sort of “everyman,” the generic subject of mass society, but, more importantly, it is the way in which this “everyman” was cast in very different light from the black and white morality of Capra to Hitchcock’s infinite shades of grey. The shift of directors is not just a shift of style, but a fundamental shift in the understanding of subjectivity and the world. The Capra, Ford, and Hitchcock films are well known. Perhaps less well known are the Westerns that Stewart made with Anthony Mann. Mann’s films are thematically and chronologically placed between the films of Capra and Hitchcock: Stewart plays the hero but one who is often driven by an obsession, conflicted beneath his generic exterior.

Stewart may seem like an unlikely western hero, especially to anyone who has seen The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence. Mann seemed to be aware of this, Jacques Rancière cites him as saying that he found it necessary to follow a “series of precautions” in order to make Stewart, who is not "the broad shouldered type," believable as a man who can take on the world, precautions that define the relationship between what one can do and what one must do within the film. These precautions define the relation between the character and action, a relation that breaks with almost organic connection with a mileu that Deleuze argues defines Ford’s and Hawk’s westerns. As Rancière writes, “It doesn’t much matter whether Mann’s hero is a man of justice or a reformed criminal, since that is not the source of his quality. His hero belongs to no place, has no social function and no typical Western role: he is not a sheriff, bandit, ranch owner, cowboy, or officer; he doesn’t defend or attack the established order, and he does not conquer or defend any land. He acts and that’s it, he does some things.”

In Winchester ’73 Stewart plays Lin McAdam a brother pitted against brother, seeking to avenge his father’s murder. Cain doesn’t so much slay Abel, but his father. This fact, this crucial motivation, is only alluded to in the opening of the film: it is finally explained much latter, during the final shootout. Initially we only know that he is pursuing a man to Dodge City with determination that borders on the murderous. Narrative completion is only given retroactively in the closing scene. Up to that point we only have a quest, a conflict without a clear sense of its stakes. This quest, with its linear obsessive determination, is immediately displaced and deferred by the rifle of the film’s title. The rifle, which is introduced before any character, the subject of the first close up, first appears as the prize in the fourth of July shooting contest organized by Wyatt Earp. The contest, and Dodge City in general, are presented as ordered and just: the story begins in place order and descends into lawlessness, a reversal of the traditional western narrative.

The contest pits Stewart against his brother, “Dutch Henry” (an alias) as two expert marksmen, both taught by the same man (their father). As Stewart says, hinting at the murder he is seeking to avenge, they were both taught how to shoot, but not why: equal in skill, but distinguished only by a slight moral difference. Just how slight this difference is made clear in the first scene where brother encounters brother. They both simultaneously reach for their guns. There is no difference of hero and villain at the level of basic actions: they are both prepared to shoot the other in (relative) cold blood. They would have shot each other, but there are no guns allowed in the oasis of order that is Dodge City, so all they can do is reach for their thighs, grasping at absent guns. As is so often the case in this film, intention exceeds action, the logic of the film restores one to the other.

Stewart wins the shooting contest, but is ambushed by his brother and the prize gun is stolen. This crime takes place within Dodge City, suggesting as the film does repeatedly that order and authority are only appearances. The plot of the film then follows three series of events. First, there is Stewart doggedly pursuing his brother from Dodge City across the west; then there is Dutch Henry, who isn’t so much fleeing pursuit as setting off on his own attempt to rob a bank; and finally there is the gun itself, which travels from the hands of Dutch, to the gun dealer who swindles him out of it, to a Native American chief (played by Rock Hudson), to the calvary, to “Waco Johnny Dean,” a member of Henry’s gang, eventually back to Henry for the final shootout. In the end Dutch Henry is defeated by Stewart and the gun is returned to its rightful owner.

This trajectory of the rifle’s movement, from hand to hand, could be understood as a kind of test, a quest with an object at its center. Criminals, corrupt gun dealers, "Indians," and cowards all try to possess the gun, only to be deemed unworthy in the moral (and racist) logic of the film. Read this way the trajectory of the rifle overlaps with that of the moral quest for vengeance and the restoration of order. It is logic of fate: the murdering brother will be killed, and the gun will return to its rightful owner. However, the gun’s trajectory is overdetermined by the events of history itself. The film makes constant reference to the Battle of Little Big Horn, and the role that the Native American’s Winchesters played in Custer’s last stand. The repeating Winchesters were able to outgun the calvary’s single shot rifles. Custer’s defeat is presented as a kind of trauma, of a reversal of the established order based on the slight difference of a faster rifle. In the final shootout Stewart is able to defeat his brother, despite his superior gun, by tossing pebbles, distracting him to waste ammunition shooting at rocks and shadows. Underneath the moral narrative in which the gun is restored to its proper owner, and justice is dealt, there is the contingency of history, of the slight differences of technology, speed, and skill that simultaneously realize and undermine any intention.

The rifle doesn't just move from hand to hand, passing from Dutch, to the gun dealer, to the chief, and so on, it also passes between two different ways of understanding events; it passes between the moral logic of destiny and the historical logic of contingency.

Mann is most well known for introducing a noir sensibility to the Western, of bringing the conflicted and ambiguous psyche of the postwar urban milieu into the open spaces of the West. However, what is interesting about Winchester ’73 is the way in which this interior space, Stewart’s drive for vengeance, a drive that borders on the obsessive, is displaced by the pure exteriority of history. History in this case is indicated by the gun itself: it is an object that is always out of place, despite being named and dated. There is nothing to keep this gun from falling into the wrong hands: materiality is defined as that which simultaneously enables and thwarts the intentions of individuals. The gun might have a rightful owner, and there might be a rightful order of justice, but a faster gun and the luck of finding it can set everything off kilter. In the end the only way to correct this, to right things, is to toss a few pebbles into the air. Slight differences of speed and timing ultimately matter more than official differences of law and order.

Perhaps when Althusser invoked the figure of the cowboy to sketch his portrait of a materialist philosopher, the philosopher of aleatory materialism who catches a moving train, he was thinking of Anthony Mann.

Lordon could be understood as connecting the lines between Spinoza’s often cited question, “why do men fight for their servitude as if it was salvation?” and the general problematic of subjection in Marx. Which is to say that Lordon is interested in how it is that people not only tolerate exploitation, continuing to reproduce the system, but actively desire it. Lordon is interested in precisely the way that contemporary capitalism, or neoliberalism, has moved beyond Marx’s concepts of exploitation and alienation to involve an active participation in one’s subjection, exactly what Spinoza question, and his examination of the affects, would seem to analyze.

The general problem of society, any society, is the articulation of its particular conatus, its particular striving, or functioning, with that of the individuals and collectives that constitute it. For society to function we must desire to do so, and we do this because we must believe that it is the necessary condition of our desires. Lordon dubs this problem, or its solution, colinearization. One of the most important factors of colinearization in capitalism is money itself. For Spinoza anything that is believed to be the cause of joy, of the increase of one’s power, is an object of love. Thus, it is possible to consider money as the “universal equivalent of desire,” as the object which is seen as the cause of any possible joy, any possible desire. Money captures desire and imagination.

Perhaps one of the most interesting remarks that Lordon makes has to do with precisely how he understands the politics of the imagination. Lordon cites the passage from Spinoza in which he argues that there is no opposite of excessive self-esteem. It is possible to overestimate oneself, and to some extent this overestimation, mankind as "kingdom within a kingdom" is the human condition. As Spinoza writes,

“For no one, out of hate, thinks less highly of himself than is just. Indeed, no one thinks less highly of himself than is just, insofar as he imagines that he cannot do this or that. For whatever man imagines he cannot do, he necessarily images; and he is so disposed by this imagination that he really cannot do what he imagines he cannot do this or that, he is not determined to do it, and consequently it is impossible for him to do it.”

Thus, to use the language of pop psychology, there is thus no such thing as “low self-esteem.” If one thinks that one cannot do something, then one effectively cannot do it. The imagination is a material force that determines one’s conduct.

There are thus two strategies for colinearization, for making the desire of individuals conform to society. The first is a kind of imaginary fullness, as in the case of money as the object of desire. It is full because through it the given social order represents itself as the possible realization of every desire. The second draws the limits of what is possible, curtailing modes of thinking and living. These limitations, the poverty of the imagination, has real material effects,.The central message of any social order, reflected in its practices, ideologies, and actions is “everything is here, nothing else is possible.” Society, or should we say capital, is the kettling of the imagination.

The determining and delimiting of the imagination is not alienation. It is one of the merits of Lordon’s book that he is so attentive to Spinoza’s position with respect to the bourgeois homilies of self, interiority and freedom. He argues that Spinoza’s capacity to “affect and be affected” is always realized, always actualized. There is no reserve in Spinoza’s ontology. Lordon follows Pascal Sévérac in arguing that Spinoza’s merit is in abandoning all themes of alienation or separation, themes that still show up in Deleuze (not to mention Fischbach), in favor of fixation. No one is every really separated from the powers, from their capacities; these capacities are just fixated into particular objects and goals, objects which are defined by the poverty of the social imagination.

The outside of fixation, of a limited and curtailed imagination, cannot come from a reservoir of freedom, from a subject outside of history. It must come from within the order itself. Lordon’s answer to this is Spinoza’s concept of indignation, “the hate towards someone who has done evil toward another.” Indignation, expanded to encompass the affective hatred for the existing order, is something precarious, produced by a series of encounters and frustrations, extending throughout the social body through a series of encounters. Indignation does not come from the outside, from outside of the social order, but is produced internally, by any orders limited conception of desire. As such it is not some return to an originary freedom, but only a “détournent du détourement,” a deviation of the already established goals of society to something other.

That is precisely the question: what is this something else? Or, more importantly, how can it be produced? Spinoza’s immanence reminds us that our minds our limited by our imagination, which are in turn limited by our bodies, which are in turn limited by our minds, and so on. The intersection of all of these determinations is also the intersection of different sites for transformation. We imagine that nothing is possible, that nothing can be done, but only up to the point that someone actually does something. Once that happens, once there is an opposition to an existing order, a Paris Commune, a May '68, etc., In such moments the very limits of the world, of what is possible, are redrawn. However, these fleeting moments of possibility, the indignation of the moment, need new thoughts new bodies to sustain them. According to Lordon, the transformation of bodies by the imagination and the extension of indignation into organization is the work of politics.